BOOKS WIsh to see, the degree and kInd of his love. But he does not put a name to It-perhaps because It has never be- longed to him, he thinks he has no hon- est right to it. Or perhaps because the names look weak next to the grandeur of his feelings, arrogantly set out before the world. As he writes in "The Magic Mountain," he has already achieved "per- fect clarity in ambiguity": "Love is always simply itself: both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is des- tined to decay. . . . In God's good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved!" It must be unresolved, so it can be learned again, in the pages of his books. . 5UPREME FICTION America is in the details BY GEOR.GE STEINER. S IN E " oger's Ver- SIon, ten years ago, theology has become John Updike's "supreme fiction " That phrase belonged, fa- mously, to Wallace Ste- vens. With time, vivid affinities are becoming Mter which flames and evident between Stevens gas consume the Temple and Updike. They are of True and Actual Faith: the masters of a sensuous "Then there was no more abstraction, profoundly pain, but for the briefest American. In this new burning edge, like the novel, "In the Beauty of crinkly orange margin the Lilies" (Knopf; John Updike that consumes the paper $25.95)-scriptural, hymnic in its very of a cigarette in advance of the growing title-Updike's immersion in the lit- tobacco ash." erature of American Protestant theology Between that hot day in the spring of IS awesome, as is the virtuosity of his 1910 in Paterson, New Jersey, on which pastiche: Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergy- man, loses his belief in God and the crazed death of his great-grandson eighty years later, Updike deploys his panop- ticon. The magic is one of surrealism, but in a literal sense of the word. Things, ob- jects, mechanical-industrial proceedings, interiors, the play of light on fabrics are detailed, anatomized, and held up for sensory inspection with a loving mastery that no other novelist at present can match. Catalogues of foodstuffs, house- hold goods, drugs, silent movies and talkies, engine parts take on a weird, suffocating life force, like rubber plants gone mad in a greenhouse. The real is made surreal. When a young woman takes off her corset, she divides and parts herself"from the semi-elastic carapace, much as one splits the nubbled belly of a Maine lob- ster to get at the meat." In the textile The young century was thronged wIth a parade of inventions that amused Clarence when little else did, and the presumptuous, ragged, hopeful sound of a doughty little motorrig brought a ray of innocent energy, such as messenger angels would ride to earth, into his invalid mood The hoarse receding note drew his consciousness to a fine point, and while that point hung in his skull starlIke he fell asleep upon the adamant bosom of the depleted universe. At the close of the novel, that sleep will turn into apocalyptic nightmare in the fire death, closely modelled on the Davidian cult disaster, of a sect in Colorado: Why does God set before us and Jesus this cup brimming with the wine of His wrath, with fire and brimstone and hailstones the =:I size of a talent? Why not give us a nice Coca- Cola or cold cider? Jesus wanted it to pass. He was a young man, with a great future in preach- ; ing and healing. But He had to drink that Q cup, He had to be whipped and humiliated in HIs naked body and nalled to that cross by big ugly spikes right through the palms of His hands and hung there so He could hardly get breath into His lungs in order to take away old Adam's sin, the sin of the world. 105 FRANCE S ome like it hot on the Cote d' Azur Others like it pretty in Provence Steak au poivre in a friendl) Pari bistro? Or fresh oysters opposite the flower market in Cannes? 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